About

TagNotate is a collaboration between a psychology professor, a gaming developer, and a programmer.

Gerry Altmann conceived of Tagnotate while struggling with highlighter pens and an ever-increasing pile of articles on his desk. Gerry is from the UK, and is a professor of psychology. His research is on how the human brain “does” language (and various other things). He has published numerous research articles, edits one of the largest academic journals in his field of study, and has sat on various committees that decide which scientific research projects should be prioritized for funding. His committee and editorial work, and the increasing number of articles he has to read for his own research, are what convinced him of the need for TagNotate.

Richard Buck is a programmer based in the UK. He is responsible for all the proprietary coding that went into, and continues to go into, Tagnotate. Rich quickly learned to ignore Gerry’s ideas about interface design, and came up with vastly improved ways of handling the complexities that were required. What had originally been conceived of as a 3-month project turned into two years of development. When not working on TagNotate, Rich spends his time on other projects, many of which are with the third member of the team:

Tim Page is originally from the UK but moved to the US to work as Executive Producer in charge of external development at Virgin Interactive. He had previously been a Studio Director at Philips (back in the days of CD-i). After a few years he set up his own company developing gaming software in Reno, Nevada Tim is experienced in project management and creative software design. While surfing the web one day, he came across an entry in Gerry’s blog asking whether there were any developers out there who might be interested in developing a new idea with him. They met, ate sushi, shook hands, and set up a company together.

Tim and Gerry Inc. is the company set up to develop and publish Tagnotate and related products. Although it was relatively easy to think up the name Tagnotate, a name for the company was harder. Until, that is, someone pointed out the coincidence that “Tim and Gerry” abbreviates to “TAG”. It became clear at that moment that the company could be called only one thing.

Gerry went a bit crazy one day and ordered a load of merch. When it arrived,Rich went a bit crazy and decided to model it in the English countryside.